Making a Decision
by CuteKick
Summary: Members of the S.T.A.R.S. have taken on a special mission at the Alpine Ski Resort. When things go wrong, can anyone really be blamed for decisions made when it's life or death? One-shot. Rebecca/Chris and one surprise guest star. Please R/R! * *


Alpine Resort

SSX Preliminaries

2340hrs

Chris Redfield and his medic, Rebecca Chambers, were breathing hard as they made their way through the luxurious Alpine Resort, popping isolated shots only at the infected that got in their way. It had been a long mission, and ammunition was running short. However, the mission itself had been a success; they had retrieved the data used to create this latest monstrosity of an experiment. But the resort had been deemed a total loss. In 20 minutes, a 2000-pound bomb was going to make sure the infection didn't spread anywhere else.

The route they had planned to reach their extraction was practically a straight line. It would take them down the second story balcony over-looking the lobby, down the open, winding staircase and out the front door into the courtyard. Leon and Chris's beloved sister, Claire, would touch down long enough for the two of them to jump in the Blackhawk and then get the hell out of dodge before the Air Force turned the place into a hole in the world. The entire resort was swarming with infected, most of them freshly reanimated and hungry for their first taste of living flesh. But if the two of them stuck to the route and didn't waste a single second they could easily avoid being overrun.

"Bravo One, this is Alpha One Romeo," Rebecca said into the radio. "5-mikes to rendezvous, how copy?" She fired a couple more well aim shots and blew the backs out of a couple more zombie heads.

"_Copy that, Alpha One Romeo," _Leon's voice crackled back. "_Bird in-bound."_

She turned to Chris and gave him the thumbs up. He nodded and motioned for her to continue across the floor toward the stairs. But a burst of sudden movement from the opposite side of the floor stopped them both in their tracks. A woman came rushing out of one of the rooms right into a swarm of infected. She was screaming for them to help her, to take her with them. Chris and Rebecca recovered from their surprise in time to see her get halfway down the winding stairwell on that side, screaming for them to save her, and then get rushed by several infected coming up the stairs from the first floor.

"Hey!" Chris shouted, but it was too late.

The woman was toppled over the railing and plummeted to the first floor, crashing through one of the lobby's glass end tables.

Rebecca exchanged looks of 'oh shit' with Chris. "Let's go!" she said and began making her way to down the floor.

But Chris grabbed her arm. "Negative. It's too late for that now. We are getting to that extraction point. Do you hear me?"

"Chris, we can't leave her!" Rebecca argued jerking her arm free. "We can go down and get her and take her with us. We _cannot_ leave her here to become one of _them_!" She didn't even wait for a response before taking off again.

"Son of a…" Chris didn't agree but he wasn't going to let Rebecca take on the horde by herself. "Call it in," he told her moving up to her side and settling into a steady forward motion. He shot a few more zombies and watched them tumble down the stairs.

"Bravo One, this is Alpha One Romeo, break. We have a civilian casualty, I say again, we have a civilian casualty, prepare to EVAC. How copy?"

"_Negative, Alpha One Romeo," _Leon said. "_You get your asses outside and lets go, we don't have to time for casualties. Acknowledge!"_

They began making their way down the stairs, popping infected and moving as fast as they could to the ground floor. When they reached the bottom, Rebecca saw a direct path to the woman and took it, shouting for Chris to cover her.

Running and shooting at the same time Rebecca cleaved a bloody path to the fallen woman and cleared enough zombies from the immediate area to give her time to assess the injuries. She changed out her nine-millimeter magazine and dropped to one knee.

"Hey, are you still with me?" she shouted at the woman, shaking her briskly. The woman moaned something incoherent, which was exactly what Rebecca had been praying for. "She's still alive, Chris!" She could feel his expert gun fire wiz past her head as he kept the zombies off of her, while at the same time running from position to position to keep from being overwhelmed himself.

"Hurry the hell up!" he shouted at her. They were knee deep in elbows and assholes as it was, and the swarms were closing in.

Rebecca rapidly swept the woman's body for blood and her hands came up soaked with it as she worked her way down her right leg. "Shit." She pulled a tourniquet off her kit and slapped it on as high over the femoral artery as she could. The woman's skin tight jeans made that as easy task, and Rebecca cranked the metal windlass until it wouldn't crank anymore, securing it in the notch and pulling the Velcro band over it.

There was blood still coming from somewhere on the woman's body, and a lot of it. "Chris, she's leaking! I can't work here; we need to get to cover!" Rebecca stood up and blasted a few more infected.

The radio crackled to life once more over her shoulder: "_What the hell are you doing, I said get out of there! Rebecca, let's go, we don't have time for-"_

"Goddamn it, Leon, I said we're not leaving her!" Rebecca shouted into the handmic. "Chris are you ready?" She fired a few more shots and then dropped back down to the bleeding woman.

"Get her and let's go, we're getting overrun!" A few more well placed shots and then he changed magazines. "Move it!"

The zombies' moans of hunger seemed to intensify the closer they came to subduing their meals and Rebecca got to work. She went to the woman's head and hooked her arms in hers from behind to get her on her feet, but then encountered yet another problem. The woman's amazingly proportioned attributes, which would be most definitely remarkable in any other situation, we're about to get them all killed.

"Goddamn it." She put the woman down and laid some suppressive fire on the horde. "Chris! She's built like a brick shithouse, I can't carry her!" Leon was shouting over the radio but Rebecca hardly paid him notice during all the action.

Chris gritted his teeth and rushed to Rebecca's side, slamming through the zombies with kicks and punches as he went. He got there and was immediately alarmed by the pool of blood the woman was laying in. "Cover me."

He handed Rebecca his gun and she assumed a dual-wielding fighting posture, wasting infected on all sides of them while he picked up the wounded woman. "Holy shit, you weren't lying," he said once he had her securely over his shoulders in a fireman's carry. He could feel her pillow-y torso all over his shoulder and neck, and it was throwing off his balance. "Let's go!" Her blood was already soaking him as it poured from her body and onto his.

They didn't have a destination but knew that if they stayed put it was all over. Rebecca handed Chris his weapon back, and he used it with one arm while securing the woman's leg and wrist with the other.

"That room!" he yelled making his way toward the nearest one. He took point and cleared the way while Rebecca stayed right behind him, popping zombies that got too close. It was slow and tedious, but between the two of them firing interchangeably and only at the most threatening targets, they kept their perimeter clear with enough ammo to get to the door.

Just enough.

"I'm black on ammo, trade me and get that goddamn door open!" Chris yelled.

Rebecca quickly took his empty weapon and gave him hers with half a magazine left in it. Tucking the useless gun in her waistband, which burned like hell but with no time to worry about it, she then produced the master keycard that she had taken from the manager at the beginning of the mission after Chris had blown his zombified brains out. She slid it in the slot and pulled it out, but got a red light.

"Rebecca!"

"I'm trying!" She made a couple more attempts with the same result. The moans were becoming deafening and she knew that Chris only had a few more shots left. One more try and she was finally rewarded with the sound of an automatic lock rotating and the green light came on. She exploded through the door.

Chris backed his way in hurriedly as the bolt locked back on his gun after expending the last round. When he was safely through the threshold he kicked the door closed and stood with an empty weapon still trained in front of him, gasping for breath and covered in blood. The room was silent and the infected outside could only moan and claw helplessly at the door.

They had made it.

* * *

><p>"<em>Would somebody please tell me what the hell is going on in there? Chris! Rebecca! Do you read me!"<em>

Chris took the radio off Rebecca's kit as she was working on her casualty. "This is Alpha One Actual. We have the casualty secured, over."

"_The LZ is completely overrun, I repeat, we do not have a goddamn LZ."_

"Roger that. We'll link up at the alternate site, break. Leon, you gotta get us some time on station from the Air Force. Those assholes don't' have anything better to do, just keep everybody flying by, including you."

"_I'll do what I can. The alternate extraction site is 5 clicks into the wood line from there. Are you sure you can you make it with all that extra baggage?"_

Chris watched his medic working. Her face was pale and tense with concentration. "We'll die trying," he replied. "Alpha One out."

Rebecca had the woman stripped to her lingerie. She had lucked out with the leg wound; it had narrowly missed the femoral. But she had multiple penetrating thoracic trauma from shards of glass. The big wholes she had sealed closed with Hyfin occlusive dressings, but she was out of those and was starting to improvise with squares of plastic, benzoine tincture, and three-inch nylon tape. The woman's amazing physique, Rebecca knew, would create even more problems for her if she had to find a site to decompress a tension pneumothorax. The alternate sites for the procedure were already occluded with dressings which meant she would have to find a way through the front of the chest. So far the woman's respirations were equal and unlabored, but it may only be a matter of time.

"If she crashes I won't be able to save her here," Rebecca said. Her voice was cracking over the big lump in her throat and her eyes stinging with hot tears. "But I can suture her leg and manage her dressings for awhile." She blinked and large salty drops streaked her face and rolled off her chin.

Rebecca couldn't even give her morphine for the pain because it would suppress her respiratory drive, and with the amount of blood the woman had lost she needed all the oxygen she could get. She still had a palpable radial pules -just barely- so fluids were out of the question except as a last ditch effort to keep her alive; as it was, IV fluids now would only disrupt her body's natural clots and cause more internal bleeding instead of putting the needed volume back into her circulatory system.

"Rebecca…" Chris put a hand on her shoulder. "She's not one of them because of you. Dying of these wounds would be preferable to that and you know it."

Rebecca stood up nodding. "This was stupid, wasn't it." She gritted her teeth but could not help her sobs.

"Too late for that now." Chris sighed. "We need to start planning our route to the alternate LZ." He looked at the bloodied woman, still covered in that same blood himself, and suddenly had a shocking realization.

"Jesus, that's Elise Riggs," he said.

Rebecca wiped her face and looked at Chris in confusion. "You know her?"

"Not personally." He walked closer to the unconscious woman. "Champion SSX snowboarder turned model extraordinaire. I didn't think she competed anymore." He considered the situation for a moment. "I always dreamed about getting her into bed; just didn't think it would be like this."

Rebecca could tell that he was trying to lighten the situation for her sake with an uncharacteristic joke, but the seriousness on his face as he spoke ruined the effect. Chris wasn't concerned with that; he was concerned for her life. He was concerned because he would hold himself responsible for Elise's death now that she had so foolishly made her part of the equation. Why couldn't she have just listened!

"Chris, I'm-"

"Shut up," he interrupted in a low voice. "You made a choice. You're an expert at what you do because it's what you love and because you aren't willing to compromise. You're a combat medic, guardian angel of the battlefield. Don't you apologize for that. Are we up shit creek? Yes." He walked over to her and put his arms around her. "That could have been one of us lying out there, and I damn sure wouldn't have thought twice about running into the zombie swarms to pull you out. If we can't support each other 100% of the time, then when it's our turn to need saving we just might not make it out."

Just then, the woman known as Elise Riggs coughed her way back into consciousness and Rebecca was at her side in an instant. "Hey, hey… take it easy, you're okay." She was afraid she was going to blow one her occlusive dressing and start taking air into the pleural cavity. There was no telling how much blood was already collected there by now, and the last thing Rebecca wanted to have on her hands was a hemopneumothorax.

Elise was breathing rapidly but evenly, and Rebecca did not note any use of accessory muscles in her efforts. She was scared and in pain more than anything; Rebecca's interventions were holding up.

"You came for me," Elise managed to say. "I knew… you would come for me..."

The expression on her face was one of such gratitude that it brought Rebecca to tears. "Of course I did," she managed to say. "Of course I did. Now just rest for me, okay? I'm not going to leave your side. I'll be right here, okay? Just get some rest." She stroked Elise's cheeks and brushed the bloodied hair away from her face. Elise nodded wearily and collapsed back onto the bed, asleep once more.

Rebecca looked back at Chris, who gave her an approving nod.

"She's going to be okay," Rebecca told him.

Somehow, someway, they were all going to be okay.


End file.
